(After a minute or so, the switch turned off the port connected to the laptop…)

Addendum: Today (22Dec), Byron, Phil, and I attempted VNC-doom: 3 laptops, 1 gigabit-ethernet switch, and an attempt at a full 3-way mesh of screen sharing.

We found bugs. Lots of annoying little bugs. The most entertaining/frustrating version was inducing one-way visibility in the clients. So we didn’t get the full-mesh going today, but we got some really pretty pictures from having two loops running at once. Maybe after a round or two of bug fixing (if reports have any effect), we’ll give it another shot.

But I think next time, we’ll need 5 laptops in a mesh. Not only do you get a nice layout on the client screens (one peer in each corner), you end up with a pentagram for a diagram as a bonus :).

Digging around to see if maybe the pain in my head is more than just my second cold this year. Wandering through various pollen count sites lead to wandering through allergists and other specialists. On more than one site I’ve found a link to this:

At least twice a year, we have fatalities in the Texas hill-country due to people thinking they can drive across a bridge that has a little water running over it.

In their heads, I picture “hey – I can see the bridge – my car’s pretty heavy – and it’ll be a real pain in the ass to drive around to the next crossing”.

And they ALWAYS end up swept downstream. Most of them get swept out of the gene pool. Scary, sad, and mind-boggling given that it happens so frequently that it’s hard to imagine they didn’t have an opportunity to learn vicariously from someone else’s really bad oops.

So yesterday, I was driving back from my parent’s house at Canyon Lake and stopped by Gruene – a small town at the edge of New Braunfels. The Gruene crossing of the Guadalupe was underwater. It had been since Thursday. There were signs way back up the road noting that the bridge was out, and barricades right in front of the bridge on both sides.

Now this time, the people involved were really lucky. They were saved by fluke of the way the riverbank works on that side of the bridge – they were swept off into a really shallow area full of cypress roots and had lots of structure to stop the car and let them get safely out. Nobody was hurt.

Look at this though. The water is welling up more than a foot on the upstream side of the bridge. Would you try to go across this in a car? If you thought so, change your mind now. It’s not worth it.